DONALD PATERSON
About Donald Paterson
Donald Paterson was born in Motherwell, but grew up in Tain in the Scottish Highlands. After studying at Aberdeen University, he taught for many years in Aberlour and, more recently, in Inverness. Donald lives with his wife Val in Fortrose, on the Black Isle, where the dolphins swim only a short evening walk away. Homecomings is his first novel.
Praise for Donald Paterson
'Donald Paterson is a writer of litheness, humanity, wisdom and ambition, and a truly great storyteller, whose take on life is artful and whose take on art is marvellously alive. You won't want this novel to end.’ – Ali Smith
An interview with Donald Paterson
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I’ve written for as long as I can remember. I used to write stories when I was still at school and I’ve never really stopped ever since, mostly for my own pleasure. I think I started because I wanted to be able to make up the kind of world I loved reading about. I think as a child I spent a lot of time living in landscapes written by C S Lewis, Arthur C Clarke, Allan Campbell MacLean, Robert Louis Stevenson and so on. But the novelist that made me wonder if I might actually be an author was Anthony Burgess, the most endlessly inventive writer I can think of. When I was in my twenties I spent a lot of time regretting that I wasn’t Anthony Burgess.
I’m also inspired by song writers that can capture a truth in a single line. Paul Simon can do that sometimes, but for me, above all, Tom Waits does that best. “Time is just memory mixed with desire”: maybe the aim of any writer is to say something true in as few words as possible. I’d like to be able to write a novel as economic as Tom Waits’ Burma Shave or as evocative as Soldier’s Things.
Films, too. I like Jim Jarmusch and Terrence Malick. Both directors capture the way that life is just one thing after another, and the way that we aspire to lead an authentic life. I think fiction is about that hunt for authenticity.
I think I enjoy writing because it’s easier than real life.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Homecomings in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
This book has several starting points. I’ve always found the clearances intriguing and I wanted to write about that, especially the way that they can be viewed as a starting point as well as the ending of a way of life. That villain of the clearances, Patrick Sellar, is buried in the grounds of Elgin cathedral, a pillar of the community, a local moderniser after whom streets were named. That odd paradox of the clearances interests me. The way so many of those cleared from the interior just kept going is fascinating too. As if a culture that had been rooted in one place for generations found, its roots removed, that it could not stop moving on. Hugh Ross, the central character in the book, represents that desire to keep on going, in the hope that things will turn out well. But that’s not unusual: we’re all the same, in one way or another.
And I’d read about Fort Tejon in California and what happened there in 1857 … without going into detail, as the plot of the novel hinges on that, it struck me as an intriguing little moment in history, so I worked that into the book. I think key moments in our lives hinge on the random and that’s what happens in Homecomings.
In terms of the ideas I wanted to develop in this book, I suppose it has to do with our desire to make our lives into stories (there are a lot of stories in the novel), and the way we can ignore truths that everyone else can see, just to try to make the story read the way we think it ought to read. Hugh Ross in Homecomings doesn’t understand very much about the world round about him and most of all he doesn’t really understand himself, or his love for others. It’s not a love story but it’s about learning to understand love. Or maybe it is a love story.
I’m not sure about conveying ideas. I’d prefer readers to draw their own conclusions, which may or may not coincide with my own conclusions about the novel. So I’d better not say what I think.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
It’s not really my voice in Homecomings. To get Hugh’s voice right I had to think about him a lot. Before writing the book I had to think through the whole plot from his point of view. A character’s voice is the character and if you don’t understand the character you’ll never get the voice right. So creating the voice is the same thing as creating the character. Tension in a novel comes from conflict between voices.
I believe that a writer who has a distinctive voice also has a limitation.
How and when do you write?
I start with a long period of thinking (maybe lasting months) when I don’t write anything down at all. Then I start to plan and at that stage I build up a diagram that is a kind of map of the book. Kurt Vonnegut (or Kilgore Trout, at any rate) has a description of planning a novel on a roll of wallpaper, with lines representing each character. Every now and then a major event happens and some characters come out the other side and some don’t. I like that kind of visual approach to planning writing and that’s what I do.
Then I plan in a notebook, with a few pages to each chapter or section of the book, and I note down the main incidents, and some phrases that I’d like to use. I work with that notebook for a while before really starting to write the book itself. It’s just more thinking time, really.
Eventually I get down to the actual process of writing, and I do that at the computer or laptop, usually in bursts of an hour or two at a time. I find I can’t do more than that without feeling physically sick.
I just start at the beginning and work my way through until the book is finished. Then I go back and rewrite and rewrite, and listen to advice because it’s easy to get too close to what you’ve written and lose sight of what’s good and what’s not so good in your writing. The worst mistake you could make as a writer would be to like your writing too much, to feel too possessive.
I don’t always write in solitude – I quite like working where it’s busy. I can’t think of a better place to write than Charles Leakey’s secondhand bookshop in Inverness, surrounded by so many words, all of them pre-owned. There’s a hotel in Puerto Calero in Lanzarote that’s good too. That’s where a lot of the work of Homecomings was done.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I think it’s good to read as widely as possible. Read too much of the same thing and there’s a danger of your own writing beginning to sound like pastiche. And I think you get different things from different writers. I like reading Muriel Spark or Italo Calvino for the sheer joy of seeing how to put a story together. Ian Rankin or Elmore Leonard for the clean lines of plot development (I wish I had that skill). Robin Jenkins or F Scott Fitzgerald for the ability to create characters that are both despicable and admirable at the same moment. Bernard Malamud or Shakespeare for their dramatisation of uncertainty. Stephen Jay Gould or Steven Pinker for the doggedness with which ideas lead to other ideas. Anthony Horowitz or Lee Child for that ability to build tension that actually makes your heart beat faster, a game in itself. Ali Smith or Coleridge for showing that, in writing, intelligence and emotion can be the same kind of thing, and equally valid.
I like almost everything I read but I’m not sure if that’s maybe because I only read things that I like. I try not to be judgemental: I think I can learn from anyone.
Just now I’m reading Love is a Fervent Fire by Robin Jenkins and as always when I read him I am astonished by his combination of seriousness and light-heartedness. It would be good to be reborn and have all those Jenkins novels to read for the first time once again. To be reborn as Robin Jenkins would be asking too much.
